He was more complicated than perceived by either

his admirers or his detractors.

The Real Billy Mitchell By Rebecca Grant

W HICH Billy Mitchell was the

real Billy Mitchell? Was it the
firebrand who advocated strategic
bombing and predicted in 1925 that,
in the next war, “air forces will strike
immediately at the enemy’s manu-
facturing and food centers, railways,
bridges, canals, and harbors”? Or
was it the experienced World War I
air commander who authorized large
numbers of ground attack and inter-
diction sorties and wrote, “Only by
the combined work of all our arms
will our full power be developed”?
The two Mitchells are indeed hard
to reconcile. Mitchell’s career as an
aviator lasted just 10 years, from
flying lessons in 1916 until his res-
ignation from the Army in 1926. He
spent the post-resignation decade
writing on aviation and other sub- Mitchell was a bold advocate for airpower. In commanding air forces from
jects, but he died in 1936, long be- several nations in 1918 and through later experiments and demonstrations, he
fore the great World War II test of laid the foundation for US airpower today.
airpower. He thus never had an op-
portunity to revise or expand his the first aircraft carrier. Naval avia- riding over the Navy’s dead to fur-
views. His record and writings pro- tors, however, never gave him any ther his own interests. I’m going back
duce many different images of the credit for this. to Washington and put a stop to this!”
man—each one vivid. Conflicts between Mitchell and Two days after the disaster, Moffett
One of the strongest negative im- Moffett formed a true sore point publicly denounced Mitchell, and soon
ages of Mitchell comes from the an- that has lingered for decades. After the court-martial was on.
nals of naval aviation, where Mitchell the famous crash of the Navy air- Moffett’s aide at that time was
is still regarded as a minor demon. ship Shenandoah on Sept. 3, 1925, Jocko Clark, then a Navy lieutenant
This is perplexing. True, Mitchell Mitchell issued a 6,000-word state- but destined to become a renowned
did once refer to the aircraft carrier ment that included this: “All avia- World War II carrier admiral in the
as “a snare and a delusion.” At the tion policies, schemes and systems Pacific. Clark’s own encounters with
same time, some naval historians are dictated by the nonflying offi- Mitchell had an interesting twist.
credit Mitchell with causing such a cers of the Army and Navy who know Four years after the Shenandoah in-
commotion about airpower that it practically nothing about it. The lives cident, Mitchell and Clark traveled
forced Navy leaders in 1921 to es- of airmen are being used merely as together to Langley, Va., for meet-
tablish the Bureau of Aeronautics. pawns in their hands.” The state- ings of the National Advisory Com-
This was the cradle of naval aviation ment, as he predicted, brought him a mittee for Aeronautics. As they came
developments under Rear Adm. Wil- court-martial. down from Washington, D.C., on a
liam A. Moffett. night steamer, Clark “listened to
Even Mitchell’s famous battleship “That SOB ...” Mitchell by the hour, getting to know
bombing tests turned out to be help- An aide found Moffett, who was in him quite well.” Said Clark: “His
ful to naval aviation. Only days after San Francisco, “pacing the floor” over visions of aviation in the future were
Mitchell’s aviators sank the German Mitchell’s affront. To the aide, Moffett impressive. I had to admire him for
battleship Ostfriesland off the Vir- shouted, “Did you see what Billy his foresight, yet I realized that he
ginia Capes in 1921, Congress funded Mitchell said? That son of a bitch is was years ahead of his time.”
64 AIR FORCE Magazine / February 2001
 Clark’s evenhanded treatment of
Mitchell was—and is—unusual. It
was the negative image that stuck.
Intense hostility was still on display
in 1963, almost 40 years after the
court-martial, when naval historian
Samuel Eliot Morison charged that
“propaganda by Brigadier General
William Mitchell” was one of the
major factors that “kept the Navy
weak” before World War II. Morison
ridiculed Mitchell for prophesying
around the clock. He dismissed the
Ostfriesland experiments as “some
practice sinkings of moored, un-
armed, and defenseless naval hulks.”
In 1991, Nathan Miller’s short
study, “The Naval Air War 1939–
45,” carved up Mitchell on the last
page for contending that “superior
airpower will dominate all sea areas
when they act from land bases.”
Mitchell was hard to forget or for-
give.
In the early Army Air Corps, Mitch-
ell enjoyed a much more positive repu-
tation, of course. However, he even-
tually lost favor among airmen, too.
Many harsh reappraisals of the effec-
tiveness of World War II strategic
bombing tended to point an accusa-
tory finger at Mitchell. He was blamed
for engendering a bomber-only ap-
proach to air war, even though he had
argued for the use of pursuit aircraft
and bombers in combination.
Not His Own Ideas?
Others questioned the originality
of Mitchell’s thought. These revi-
sionists postulated that Mitchell had
just absorbed his ideas on airpower
from others such as Brig. Gen. Ma-
son M. Patrick, the chief of Ameri-
can Expeditionary Force’s Air Ser-
vice in France in 1918, and Col.
Thomas DeWitt Milling, chief of Air
Service, First Army, in France.
Then came silence. In Col. John
Warden’s much-lauded 1988 book,
The Air Campaign, Mitchell was not
once mentioned, not even in the bib-
liography. Since Warden went over
the concepts of air superiority and
vital centers in detail, the omission
suggested that Mitchell’s World War
I experiences in these areas had van-
ished from the scene as far as lead-
ing theorists within the Air Force
were concerned. Several books on
the Gulf War gave a nod to Mitchell
for advocating strategic attack as a
war-winning technique, but the vi-
tal-centers thesis captured only a
AIR FORCE Magazine / February 2001
After the Ostfriesland, Mitchell’s bombardiers conducted a demonstration in
September hitting the battleship Alabama with phosphorus (as shown here),
tear gas, and other bombs.
fragment of Mitchell’s experience
with employing airpower.
Mitchell’s reputation hit rock bot-
tom in 1994 with the publication by
R AND of Carl Builder’s book, The
Icarus Syndrome. In Builder’s eyes,
Mitchell was so influenced by Giulio
Douhet, the European airpower theo-
rist, and British Maj. Gen. Hugh
Trenchard, commander of the Royal
Flying Corps, that he was more of
“an advocate and promoter of air-
power” than a “theorist or institu-
tion builder.” Mitchell was a “flam-
ing evangelist” obsessed with airplanes
and flying, whose legacy of seeing
airmen as a breed apart reverberated
“with devastating effects” for the
Air Force down to the current day.
In 1997, a new collection of Mitch-
ell’s sayings emerged in print. It gave
a more balanced view of his bons mots
and remarked on the freshness and
impact of what he had to say about
airpower. Still, his reputation among
airmen seemed to have come to rest on
what he preached, not what he prac-
ticed. The net result was that Mitchell
was seldom appreciated for what he
did best: exercising professional and
effective command of airpower.
The real Billy Mitchell—the one
who made the most sense—was Mitch-
ell the warrior. A much more detailed
view of Mitchell comes through in
his experiences commanding airpower
in World War I, and this side illumi-
nates all that he did later.
A good portrait of Mitchell emerges
from accounts of his first visit to
Trenchard’s headquarters. Trenchard
had just spent two years figuring out
how to employ airpower and deal
with some difficult ground command-
ers. British fliers knew he was com-
ing but Mitchell arrived at an incon-
venient moment and Trenchard’s
aide, Maurice Baring, politely tried
to reschedule.
At that moment, Trenchard ap-
peared and asked Mitchell what he
wanted.
“I’d like to see your equipment,
your stores, and the way you arrange
your system of supply,” Mitchell
began. “Also, I need to know all you
can tell me about operations, be-
cause we will be joining you in these
before long.”
Fortunately, the hot-tempered
Trenchard was disarmed by Mitch-
ell’s “good-natured impudence” and
let the American shadow him for
three days. Mitchell had a “deep re-
spect” for Trenchard. Trenchard, for
his part, called Mitchell “a man after
my own heart” and told Baring that
“if he can only break his habit of
trying to convert opponents by kill-
ing them, he’ll go far.”
With Trenchard, Mitchell showed
his practical side and his desire to
make the maximum impact with air
forces. Trenchard taught Mitchell that
the airplane was, above all, a weapon
of attack to be concentrated in a
vigorous offensive to control the air,
reaching “just as far into the enemy
country as possible.” First came air
superiority. Afterward, artillery co-
65
operation, reconnaissance, and even
ground attack and long-range bomb-
ing could follow. Airpower had to be
under a unified command.
Mitchell was the perfect student.
He was not only eager to learn but was
also brilliant in applying Trenchard’s
guidance to the needs of Gen. John J.
“Black Jack” Pershing and the AEF. It
was here that he made his first, and
greatest, contributions. The essentially
static Western Front of 1914–17 had
changed by 1918, becoming more fluid.
In what Pershing called “open war-
fare,” aviation was suddenly valuable.
Commanders increasingly depended
on air reconnaissance for rapid up-
dates and comprehensive information
about a developing battle. They also
needed air superiority to keep the
enemy’s aircraft away from their
troops. Air could also go after enemy
soldiers trying to reinforce their lines
or cover a retreat.
Close and Deep
Mitchell picked up on these les-
sons on how air operations could
help control the battle by operating
both close and deep, or in his ver-
nacular, producing both “tactical”
and “strategical” effects.
Tactical aviation took place within
the range of field artillery. Mitchell
defined its primary function as en-
suring “observation for the fire and
control of our own artillery.” “This
kind of air work has been done now
for three years and is well under-
stood,” said Mitchell.
Mitchell (at center, with walking stick) and his staff pose at Koblenz, Germany,
in January 1919. His World War I experiences, he said, had “conclusively
shown that aviation was a dominant element in the making of war.”
66
Strategical aviation was “air at-
tack of enemy material of all kinds
behind his lines,” including enemy
aircraft, air depots, and air organiza-
tion. Factories, lines of communica-
tion, and personnel were also strate-
gical. As a rough guide, targets
located 25,000 yards or more from
the line—approximately the reach
of most long-range artillery—were
strategical targets.
As Mitchell explained, strategical
aviation would “have an indepen-
dent mission very much as indepen-
dent cavalry used to have, as distin-
guished from divisional cavalry.”
Neither tactical nor strategical air
operations could progress too far
without air superiority, and for
Mitchell it was the top priority. In
fact, Mitchell noted, he had French,
British, and Italian forces chopped
to him for the 1918 Battle of St.
Mihiel to have “a preponderance in
the air for at least two days before
the Germans could concentrate.” His
grasp of the operational level of war
gave airpower several roles in the
overall campaign.
Mitchell also had to work with
Army ground commanders and some-
times prod them to see the battle as
airmen saw it. He had a lot to say
about armies and navies after the
war, but in France, he was an able air
component commander who made
real contributions to the joint effort.
Mitchell could grasp and analyze
the whole of the campaign, just as a
ground forces general would do. At
Soissons in July 1918, he flew over
the lines and dashed back to the head-
quarters of Field Marshal Ferdinand
Foch, the allied commander in France.
“If we could get well to the rear of
the enemy with our air forces and
have tanks jump on him in front, we
would come pretty near to destroy-
ing the German army,” Mitchell re-
ported.
The Smile on Jack’s Face
In his World War I memoirs,
Mitchell told of attending Pershing’s
staff meeting just before the start of
the battle at St. Mihiel. Army engi-
neers wanted to delay the attack be-
cause of rain. Mitchell interjected
that he had just been over the lines
and saw enemy troops starting to
evacuate the salient. According to
Mitchell, “Pershing smiled and or-
dered the attack.”
Pershing rewarded Mitchell with
a big role for the Air Service. In
preparation for St. Mihiel, Mitchell
said, Pershing helped them “in every
way” and had much for the “air
people” to do. Pershing’s official
orders for the operation proved it:
“The Army pursuit aviation will de-
fend the Army front from hostile air
attack, protect its own observation
aviation, and hold itself in readiness
to attack troops on the ground in the
immediate vicinity of our front.” This
was a new and comprehensive air
doctrine, tested by Trenchard, to be
sure, but never combined with such
a concentration of air in the way
Mitchell did it for Pershing.
Historian Walter Boyne called
St. Mihiel Mitchell’s “signature
note.” As Mitchell said, it was “the
first time in history in which an air
force, cooperating with an army,
was to act according to a broad
strategical plan which contemplated
not only facilitating the advance of
the ground troops but spreading fear
and consternation into the enemy’s
line of communications, his re-
placement system, and the cities
behind them which supplied our
foe with the sinews of war.” Sub-
sequent operations used the same
tactics. Ten days later, at Argonne,
the American Army had under its
control more than 800 airplanes,
which kept down the German air-
craft during the initial stages of the
battle and also rendered valuable
service in bombing sensitive points
and in securing information.
AIR FORCE Magazine / February 2001
 Mitchell’s command of airpower
forces during 1918 was so clear that
his basic concepts could be seen in
air employment in combined opera-
tions for the rest of the 20th century.
He wrote of the German efforts to
retreat from St. Mihiel: “Our air force,
by attacking their transportation
trains, railroads, and columns on the
roads, piled them up with debris so
that it was impossible for many of
their troops to get away quickly, re-
sulting in their capture by our infan-
try.” Gen. Omar N. Bradley at the
Falaise pocket in 1944 or Lt. Gen.
Frederick M. Franks Jr., VII Corps
commander, in the southern Iraqi
desert in 1991 could have said the
same thing.
1919 Offensives
To Mitchell, “the European War
was only the kindergarten of avia-
tion.” He thought the next war could
be devastating. The plans for the
1919 offensives may have loomed
large in Mitchell’s mind. In that
year, the allies were to have mounted
a major air offensive and carried it
deep into Germany, using poison
gas and incendiary weapons to deci-
mate the opponent. Mitchell and
others naturally took the plans as a
jumping-off point for future war sce-
narios. In their view, airpower was
a necessity, not a luxury. A strong,
independent air force would be the
major player from the start. If the
air force withered, then when the
next war came, “we would start out
again by making terrible mistakes
and perhaps be defeated before we
began.”
All of these influences produced in
Mitchell a core belief: Development
of airpower “must be based on the
grand hypothesis that future contests
will depend primarily on the amount
of airpower that a nation could pro-
duce and apply.” To back it up, he
touched on his wartime experience,
writing that the war had “conclusively
shown that aviation was a dominant
element in the making of war even in
the comparatively small way in which
it was used by the armies in Europe.”
His grand hypothesis committed
Mitchell to do all he could to build up
the efficiency of the air service.
American airmen might get involved
in a European war or they might be
called to defend their own shores. If
so, airmen needed to learn how to
bomb ships.
AIR FORCE Magazine / February 2001
Maj. Gen. Mason Patrick, Chief of Air Service, is greeted at Bolling Field, D.C.,
in 1923 by Mitchell (right), his second in command. Mitchell criticized the Air
Service’s state of preparedness and equipment and was sent to the hinterlands.
The coast defense problem showed
Mitchell as a man who reveled in
trying out new tactics and cared a
great deal about how to build and
run an air force.
His most famous set of experi-
ments, of course, came with the ship
bombing trials in the summer of 1921.
Mitchell’s interest in bombing ships
probably dated back to his relation-
ship with Trenchard, who had told
Mitchell that, eventually, airpower
would be greater than sea power and
filled him in on the struggles with
British naval aviators over how to
defend the English Channel against
German bombers.
In February 1920, Mitchell com-
pleted an attack plan for defense
against an enemy fleet, using air-
craft and dirigibles. He told his boss,
“We must at all costs obtain the
battleship to attack and the neces-
sary bombs, planes, and so on to
make the test a thorough and com-
plete one.”
Mitchell was a hands-on leader.
He pulled together aircraft from bases
around the US, set up rigorous prac-
tice schedules, and supervised every
detail, down to the manufacturing of
special 2,000-pound “monster bombs.”
Navy flying boats first sank a Ger-
man submarine, then the Air Service
sank a destroyer. Mitchell orches-
trated every round, often directing
operations from his command bi-
plane Osprey while airborne over
the scene.
Mitchell favored three-wave at-
tacks of pursuit aircraft, light bomb-
ers, and finally, heavy bombers.
Soon, his forces at Langley were
ready to go after the heavily armored
Ostfriesland. A flight of aircraft with
600-pound bombs scored hits on the
ship the first day before a Navy con-
trol vessel halted the test due to
weather. The next day, with Ostfries-
land listing and taking on water,
bombers hit it with 1,100-pound
bombs, then returning in the early
afternoon with 2,000-pound bombs,
sent it to the bottom.
Pushing the Limits
The true highlights of Mitchell’s
air service career after 1919 were
his experiments and tests. These
ranged from setting world speed
records and trying out long-distance
air routes to simulating bombing
attacks on US cities and leading
expeditionary deployments to places
like Bangor, Maine. Mitchell has
been much criticized for not bow-
ing to the limits of technology. His
goal was to push those limits, and
he did it audaciously.
The final image of Mitchell is the
most contradictory one. In his book
Winged Defense, Mitchell wrote that
“airpower holds out the hope to the
nations that, in the future, air battles
taking place miles away from the fron-
tiers will be so decisive and of such
far-reaching effect that the nation
losing them will be willing to capitu-
late without resorting to a further
contest on land or water on account
67

When a Navy dirigible crashed in a storm, Mitchell made a statement to the
press, charging the War Department and Navy with incompetence and negli-
gence. He was court-martialed (above) and in 1926 resigned from the military.
of the degree of destruction which
would be sustained by the country
subjected to unrestricted air attack.”
Here was one of Mitchell’s most
enduring points: Control of the air—
and the threat of strategic bomb-
ing—might be sufficient all by itself
to bring belligerent nations back from
the brink. If that were true, he went
on, then who would need armies and
navies?
This image of Mitchell as the
airpower prophet bears zero resem-
blance to that of Mitchell the air
component commander at St. Mihiel.
Mitchell wrote in his book, Skyways:
“It is now realized that the hostile
main army in the field is a false
objective and the real objectives are
the vital centers.” Taken alone, the
vital-centers thesis seems to trump
his wartime experience. Did Mitchell
reverse himself and abandon his ac-
tual experience in wartime employ-
ment of airpower?
This is the true dilemma about
Mitchell, but the first key is to con-
sider the context. In his hope for a
quick way to end war, Mitchell was
an idealist. Some of it reflected the
times. He was after all writing in the
1920s and 1930s, not long after the
fatuous Kellogg–Briand Pact had
“outlawed” war. It was a time when
people believed in rational choice in
statecraft. If the other fellow could
see the cost, he might change his
ways. Several sections of Mitchell’s
books were laced with dreamy pas-
sages on how military airpower could
68
in peacetime perform all sorts of
domestic functions from “patrolling
against forest fires” to mapping, sur-
veying, lifesaving, and “eliminating
insect pests such as locusts and boll
weevils.”
Percentages of Victory
The second key is to recall that
Mitchell’s speculations all depended
on a firm base: gaining control of the
air first. He recommended a mix of
60 percent pursuit aircraft, 20 per-
cent bombardment, and 20 percent
observation aircraft for an air force,
indicating clearly that he saw control
of the air as a major task that would
entail a major struggle. Mitchell was
writing a decade before radar, better
air defenses, and fast fighters changed
the rules of the game. Still, his strat-
egy depended most on building a
strong air force. As in World War I,
control of the air made everything
possible: a threat to attack cities, or if
it came to that, a way to dominate the
battle on the ground or at sea.
Mitchell never closed the door on
combined arms operations. In 1926,
five days before he resigned his com-
mission, Mitchell testified to Con-
gress that, in the optimum national
defense setup, “airpower would make
Rebecca Grant is president of IRIS, a research organization in Arlington, Va.,
and has worked for R AND, the Secretary of the Air Force, and the Chief of
Staff of the Air Force. Grant is a fellow of the Eaker Institute for Aerospace
Concepts, the public policy and research arm of the Air Force Association’s
Aerospace Education Foundation. Her most recent article for Air Force
Magazine, “Schwarzkopf of Arabia,” appeared in the January 2001 issue.
approximately 50 percent, the land
forces 30 percent, and the sea forces
20 percent.”
Mitchell had many sides, positive
and negative. With his use of the
press and his lack of scruple about
playing Congress, the President, the
Army, and Navy against one another,
Mitchell’s agitation and defiance
surpassed anything Gen. Douglas
MacArthur ever did.
There was also a quirky personal
dimension to him, and it may explain
a little about the real Billy Mitchell
and why he walked into the court-
martial. In July 1921, right in the
middle of the Ostfriesland experi-
ments, Mitchell’s wealthy wife, Caro-
line, left him. In the Washington of
that day, divorce was a major event,
and Mitchell’s was dramatic and pub-
lic. One biographer described it as a
“bitter struggle that could have erupted
into a major scandal.” Apparently
Mitchell’s marital “difficulties were
common knowledge in Washington”
and may have “made it easier for his
opponents to dismiss Mitchell as ir-
responsible and unworthy of further
advancement in the Army.”
That autumn, he got his boss fired
in a showdown but failed to get the
Air Service job for himself. Mason
Patrick, the new Chief, sent Mitchell
on a long European inspection tour.
Mitchell flirted with resigning but
backed down. Nonetheless, these
episodes probably told him his op-
tions were limited. In 1923 he re-
married, but well before then, Mitch-
ell was man who had nothing to lose
politically.
Mitchell will always be unique. He
was a respected commander and a
man who seized the chance to be
America’s first combined force air
component commander in 1918. He
did it so well that he laid the founda-
tion of American airpower. Mitchell
was at his best when in command of
air forces, either in France in 1918 or
in the experiments he conducted in
the early 1920s. He left later genera-
tions of airmen a wealth of experi-
ence on how to run air campaigns and
air forces. That was what the real
Billy Mitchell held most dear. ■
AIR FORCE Magazine / February 2001